


teeth set to singing flesh

by starstrung



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: Apex Predator Species, F/M, Huddling For Warmth, Sharing a Holding Cell
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-03
Updated: 2017-01-03
Packaged: 2018-09-14 11:05:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,497
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9178792
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/starstrung/pseuds/starstrung
Summary: They get thrown into a cell, but not before they get stripped of their armor. Unfortunately, this also means any under-armor bodysuits, which is a shame, since that’s how EDI monitors their vitals. Without those, the Normandy has no way of knowing if they’re still alive. At least Shepard gets to keep her sports bra and briefs on.Garrus is not half as lucky.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I could literally blame a dozen people for enabling this (you assholes know who you are), but since I'm feeling spiteful, I'll single out [Ruth](http://archiveofourown.org/users/earwen_neruda/pseuds/earwen_neruda), [Gamble](http://archiveofourown.org/users/endquestionmark/pseuds/endquestionmark), and [Leigha](http://archiveofourown.org/users/newsbypostcard/pseuds/newsbypostcard). I hate all of you! Thanks.

Aegis Station’s a shithole. Shepard has _seen_ shitholes, she grew up in one for Christ’s sake, and Aegis is worse than that by light years. It’s been hit by pirates and slavers so many times that it’s become home to the galaxy’s audition for shittiest characters.

Omega, at least, has Aria, who keeps all that inevitable crime and corruption moving tight and on schedule, a well-oiled machine of breaking every single intergalactic law ever drafted.

It could be that Shepard’s low opinion of Aegis Station might also have to do with the fact that batarian slavers have taken her weapons, omnic-shackled her hands behind her back, confiscated her biotic amp, and are currently herding her into a holding cell. Garrus, in front of her, is in a similar predicament.

“Why haven’t we just killed them yet?” a slaver asks.

“That one’s a fucking N7 Alliance officer,” another answers, sounding smug, jabbing the butt of his rifle to indicate the insignia on Shepard’s armor. “You think about how much the Alliance is going to fork over to us in return for one of their special supersoldiers?”

Shepard wants to laugh, but manages to hide it. The Alliance doesn’t even want to admit that she’s back from the dead, let alone let her come back. There’s no way these fuckers are going to get a dime.

“And what about that one? We can just go sell him to one of the colonies, right?” the first slaver asks, pointing at Garrus, and Shepard prays that Garrus doesn’t say anything clever in response. There’s a time for snark, and it’s not when their hands are useless and they’ve got no weapons.

“Don’t you know who that is?” Shepard asks, wildly improvising.

“No, I don’t. All turians look the same to me. And this one’s especially ugly,” the second slaver asks, squinting at Garrus’ face. “Why, is he anyone important?”

“That’s a fucking Council-appointed Spectre you’re looking at,” Shepard tells him. “Newly inducted, and with the Council’s full backing.”

It helps that Garrus _looks_ like a Spectre, battle scars and all. He still wears the armor he wore when he got hit on Omega, an impressive shattering of metal right over his carapace. Shepard, on the other hand, lost all of her well-earned scars when Miranda Lawson brought her back to life in her lab.

Garrus says he still wears the armor because he likes seeing the look on his enemies’ faces when they realize he’s walked away from worse. Shepard says he needs to buy new armor that _doesn’t_ have easily recognizable structural deficiencies.

“Shit,” the first slaver says, properly awed. “We bagged ourselves a _Spectre_.”

Garrus, thankfully, goes along with it. “You caught me on a bad day. I’m on an important mission for the Council. And they’re going to do everything in their power to make sure I finish that mission.” Shepard knows him well enough to tell that he’s barely holding back laughter. She bites the inside of her mouth.

She was only really a Spectre for a few months, and she already knows that the Council wouldn’t give two shits for a captured agent. Endless resources, unlimited access, fame, glory, sure, but if that agent gets themselves into any situation compromising the Council’s precious reputation, they’re written off as a liability and a disgrace and get their names blasted off every record before the day is out.

So, really, these slavers’ chances of getting ransom money from the Council are just as good as the chances of the Alliance letting her join their ranks again. Subzero.

“We’re gonna be so rich,” the slaver says. “The Council is going to pay us a fortune for one of their top agents.”

The second slaver, however, possessing of more than the average amount of slaver intelligence, turns to narrow his eyes at Shepard suspiciously. “Why is an Alliance officer travelling with a turian Spectre anyhow?”

Garrus turns to give her a panicked look, and Shepard, unthinking, blurts out the first thing she comes up with. “I’m defecting. He was helping me get out of Alliance space. We’re running away. Together.”

The slavers give each other stunned looks, and so they miss the look that Garrus shoots her over their heads, equal parts incredulous and equal parts _what the hell are you trying to pull, Shepard_.

They get thrown into a cell, but not before they get stripped of their armor. Unfortunately, this also means any under-armor bodysuits, which is a shame, since that’s how EDI monitors their vitals. Without those, the Normandy has no way of knowing if they’re still alive. At least Shepard gets to keep her sports bra and briefs on.

Garrus is not half as lucky.

“Do you — really not wear anything underneath?” Shepard asks, trying not to shiver. Aegis Station temperature control is not really set to be comfortable for a half-naked warm-blooded human.

“Turians don’t do the underclothes thing,” Garrus says, sounding nonchalant, but there’s something in the way he’s avoiding looking at her that—.

“Garrus. Are you blushing?” she asks him, peering closer. “I genuinely can’t tell. I don’t think your blood vessels dilate enough.”

He crosses his arms defensively against her scrutiny, pointedly looks away, and doesn’t say anything.

“You _are_ ,” Shepard says, delighted.

Their conversation is interrupted by the door slamming shut, leaving them in relative darkness, just a dim glowlight on the ceiling and distant light from the hallway. The only thing Shepard can see of Garrus now are two floating glints of eyeshine.

“Hey, Shepard. We’re not going to get away with this, are we?”

“Don’t be so fucking dramatic.”

-

The plan is simple. They just have to wait, and not get killed, and the Normandy will come and bust them out of here. The problem with this plan being that Aegis Station has almost one thousand slavers on it — from what little Shepard saw of it before she was thrown into this cell — and the Normandy has, at the most, around one hundred people, if she counts the cook.

She probably shouldn’t count the cook. He doesn’t even have weapons training, and he makes a mean sausage. She’d hate to lose him.

“Not good odds,” she says out loud.

“You have a plan?” Garrus asks her. Her eyes have adjusted to the dim light, so she can see that he’s sitting with his legs drawn up, covering as much as he can.

“A shitty plan,” Shepard answers. “With shitty odds.”

Garrus brightens up at that. “Sounds like a Shepard classic.”

Shepard kicks him in the knee with her bare foot, just to see him make an indignant squawk and clap them together again.

“Hey, at least they didn’t recognize me,” Shepard says quietly, in case they have eavesdroppers. “Things might have gone worse if they realized I was Shepard. I’ve killed a lot of batarian slavers.”

“Recognize _you_?” Garrus says, matching her hushed tone. “What if they’d realized I was Archangel? My squad and I busted all of their main operations and lines of communications when I was on Omega.”

Shepard scoffs. “Don’t worry. You took a rocket to the face, remember? Everyone thinks Archangel is dead.”

“Everyone thinks Shepard is dead too,” he reminds her.

“Oh, yeah,” she says, marveling at it for a moment, like she always does when she remembers. “We’re quite a pair, aren’t we?”

“Sure we are,” Garrus says drily. “Madly in love, apparently.”

“I had to say something,” Shepard says, shrugging.

“I’m surprised they bought it,” Garrus says.

“What does that mean?” Shepard asks. “We’re not convincing as a couple?”

“I — what, no — I didn’t mean that,” Garrus says, and Shepard is biting her cheek again to keep from laughing. “I just meant — a human N7 soldier and a turian Spectre — that’s not a likely pair of, uh, lovers.”

“At ease, Garrus. I’m just giving you a hard time,” Shepard tells him, letting out a huff of laughter.

There’s not much light in here, but Shepard still doesn’t miss the dirty look he throws her. “So, this plan,” he prompts.

A shadow passes across the light from the doorway, and then stops. They may not have had a listener before, but they sure do now.

Garrus, facing away from the door, doesn’t see it, and waits for her to answer. She comes over to his side of the cell, squeezing next to him — there’s not much room. He stiffens, tries to draw back, but she stops him with a hand on his arm.

“Someone’s outside the door,” she murmurs to him. This close, she can’t help seeing everything, the narrowness of his waist, the cresting of hardened shell around his hips, the exposed leathery texture of the inside of his thighs. Everything past that is hidden in shadow, and she makes herself look away.

This is the first time she’s touched him without his armor on. His arm, she finds, is covered in thinner plates of the same hardened shell, but the spaces between have more of that soft leathery flesh.

“Shepard,” he says, his voice sounding strained. “What if they move us? Will the Normandy still be able to find us?”

It’s a grim thought. “Probably not, unless they track shuttle movements. Let’s just hope they find us before then,” she answers.

Garrus nods. His face without the tactical visor is strangely open. “So we wait for them to find us, then?” When he talks, she can feel his breath, hot and humid across her face.

It’s strange, she thinks distantly, that he’s the one curled protectively around himself when she’s the soft, fleshy one. One of his talons could easily pierce into the skin of her gut, draw out her intestines like ribbons. She lets go of his arm.

When she joined the Alliance at eighteen, the First Contact War had been a solid fifteen years ago, but they still had to learn xenobiology, namely, the vital spots of all alien species. Including turians. She has no doubt that Garrus was taught similar curriculum when he was even younger than she was.

“It’s too risky to try anything else,” she says. “We don’t have any weapons or armor.”

He raises his hand and with one long talon taps the side of her jaw, which she knows is glowing faintly red with her subdermal implants. “You still have these,” he says. “Aren’t you basically like a living weapon now?”

His voice has a note of awe in it, and she wants, briefly, to slap his hand away, for him to stop looking at her like that. For the first time since they were thrown in here, she feels exposed. Even without his rifle scope, she realizes, Garrus still has that piercing sniper gaze.

It’s only a moment, though, and it passes, leaving her feeling faintly guilty. “If you’re telling me you want me to punch my way out of this, you’ll have to ask nicer than that,” she says.

“Could you?” he asks, with genuine curiosity. “Punch your way out of this?”

She shrugs. “I’ve never tested it out. Miranda would kill me if I scratched anything up. And then she’d probably resurrect me again.”

“I think she’d forgive you in this case,” Garrus tells her. “But, fair. No punching then.”

They lapse into a silence. There is no noticeable activity in the hallway outside, although the shadow still stands guard outside their door.

Shepard doesn’t realize she’s curled closer to Garrus until he shifts his shoulder, lets her rest her head against it. It’s the same rough texture of the plates on his arms, but arranged in ridges that will probably leave an imprint across her cheek. She shivers.

“Cold?” he asks, with concern. He hesitates for a second, and then draws an arm around her carefully, like he’s trying not to hurt her.

“A bit,” Shepard admits, and it’s not really a lie.

Arranged like this, she can feel his faint warmth, not as much as her own, but enough to feel comfortable against her skin. And she can hear him breathing, longer and deeper than a human’s. His eyes are closed, head tipped back against the wall, but she doubts he’s asleep.

Her fingers find one of the plates on his chest, and she puts pressure on it, wondering how much of it he can feel, if at all. He doesn’t open his eyes, but she can also sense that he becomes more alert beneath her touch.

He doesn’t stop her, or pull away.

She’s bored, restless, tired of considering every contingency in case everything goes to shit, of calculating their odds over and over in her head. Garrus is here, right up against her, and she’s lying if she’s telling herself she hasn’t thought of it more than once. She has a faint inclination that he has too.

It was different, before, when she was still running an Alliance vessel and the chain of command still put all those comforting boundaries between things they could and couldn’t do. But now they’re both Cerberus operatives, and even though she’s still technically his commander in name, he’s not her subordinate, not really.

Her hand drifts a bit lower, where there are wider gaps between plates, and runs fingers over leathery flesh that gives beneath the pressure she puts on it.

Garrus makes a noise then, loud in the silence of their cell, a low thrumming sound caught somewhere between a purr and a growl that she can feel reverberate through his entire frame. He jerks under her touch, eyes flying open, and she draws her hand away immediately.

“Shepard — what are you —” he says, sounding choked.

“Sorry, sorry,” she says quickly, ignoring the heat curling low in her stomach. Holy shit, she wants to hear that again, but this is neither the time nor the place.

“When we get out of here, Shepard,” he says, “we’ve got to — I mean, do you want to —” he stops talking, his breathing louder than it was before.

“Yeah,” she nods. They both know what she’s agreeing to.

A noise outside in the hallway draws their attention, what sounds like a strangled yell. The shadow outside their door moves away quickly, as if their guard has run towards something. There is an audible thump, then a long, drawn-out silence before the door opens slowly.

Garrus and Shepard have both scrambled to their feet by now. Garrus tries to put himself between her and the door, but Shepard doesn’t let him. They stand side by side, ready for whatever comes through.

The doorway is empty.

Shepard has time to look at Garrus in confusion and then, with a noise like popping static, Kasumi materializes in front of them.

Garrus swears loudly.

Kasumi shushes him. “Not so loud!” She grins. “You should see your faces right now. Good thing I took a picture.” She turns her arm so that they can see the floating image of their surprised reactions on her omnic tool.

“Kasumi, I’m glad to see you, but could we, you know,” Shepard says.

“Oh, right!” Kasumi says brightly, as if she has only just remembered that they’re in a space station full of batarian slavers. “Follow me. Your armor and weapons are just over here.” Her eyes settle on Garrus as he steps out of the dark cell and into the light of the hallway. “Wow, you’re naked.”

“Really?” Garrus says, tightly. “I hadn’t noticed.”

Judging by the ease with which Kasumi breaks them out of Aegis Station, Shepard would easily believe that she’s done this several times before. Kasumi guides them to their things, as promised, and the first thing Shepard does is slide her amp back into the implant at the back of her neck, sighing in relief as it slots into place. She feels too powerless without her biotics.

With Kasumi’s help, they sneak out of Aegis without even raising an alarm. Kasumi has already gained control of Aegis’ operating system, so she easily opens every locked door between them and the shuttle bay, where a commandeered shuttle is already waiting for them.

“Goto, I’m impressed,” Garrus says, as they make their way back to the Normandy. “Scared, but also impressed.” Shepard can’t help agreeing with him. She’s glad she’s convinced Kasumi to work on her side in this fight, if only temporarily.

“Give the word, Commander, and I could space everyone on that station,” Kasumi offers.

“No, that’s fine,” Shepard says, weakly.

-

“Oh, there you are, Commander,” Joker says when she comes up to the cockpit. “We were just about to leave without you.”

“Good luck trying to find some other idiot to hire you as their pilot,” Shepard says. “How about we get as far away from this system as possible, yeah?”

Joker grins. “Sure thing, boss.”

“Shepard, I’ll be in the Main Battery room. If you need me,” Garrus says, giving her a look, and — oh, right. That. Right. To her dismay, she feels herself turning red. Garrus sees, opens his mouth as if to say something, and then abruptly leaves.

Kasumi, of course, notices. “You know, it’s odd. When I was trying to find where you two were being held, I ran across these slavers who seemed to think that Garrus and you were in love.”

“What!” Joker says, turning in his seat so quickly that Shepard is mildly worried he’ll break his fragile spine. A wide grin spreads over his face.

“Well, I should go check on Garrus,” she says faintly, and walks away with swift purpose.

-

“You know, I think the entire crew might think we’re fucking now,” Shepard announces as she walks in, locking the door behind her, and then she doesn’t say anything else until both of them have stripped completely, and Garrus has her pinned against the wall, her thighs settled around his hips.

She finds that spot with her fingers again, the spot that makes him shudder, his mandibles flaring open. That same inhuman growling sound from before tears out of him and vibrates the air between them. She can feel it echoing in her own ribcage, like the pulsing of bass, or the thrumming of a drive core.

“Fuck,” she swears.

“Shepard, you have to show me how to—”. Desperation makes the edges of Garrus’ voice higher than they usually are.

“Here. Like this,” she says, and guides him so that one arm is around her waist, holding her up, while his other moves between her thighs. She holds his wrist in place with one hand so she can fuck herself on his long, tapered fingers, the rough, pebbled texture of them making her whine without her consent.

“Is this okay, is this—” he asks, still uncertain. “I don’t want to hurt you.”

And he could. It’s all too easy to think about it when they’re both like this, his talons digging lightly into her waist, the hard weight of him settled between her thighs, all those glinting teeth exposed, right at eye level. Unbidden, her mind flashes with every old Alliance war story about throats torn out, of gouging claw marks, of turians with human blood splattered across their faces.

Shepard trusts Garrus with her life. She would trust him with his hand around her beating heart. But there’s still that part of her that feels hunted right now, primal and atavistic, and it feel like battle fever, like the adrenaline of a good fight coursing through her.

She bares her throat and begs, and like a good soldier, he does as she says, opens his jaw and puts his teeth around her neck so that she can feel their sharp points digging into her jugular, his long, curling tongue tasting her skin. He keeps his eyes open the entire time, watching her.

When she comes, it is with a yell, arching in his grip. Her reaction is violent enough to almost unsettle their precarious balance, but Garrus valiantly keeps them upright, continuing to rub his fingers between her thighs to work her through the aftershocks until she goes limp, exhaling loudly.

Garrus sets her down, careful once again, looking down at her as she recovers. He raises his hand to his mouth, and that long tongue slips out again to taste that part of her too. How would that feel curling inside her, she wonders.

“Oh,” he says, softly. “I know humans are all watery on the inside, but I wasn’t expecting there to be so much of it. How do you keep it from—”

She smiles fondly, and interrupts him. “Look, Garrus. I think you’ve learned enough about human anatomy for now. I believe it’s time you returned the favor.”

He stares at her, uncomprehending, until she pushes him against the wall, licks at the space where two shell plates meet, grinning when he hisses in response.

And with his enthusiastic help, she ends up learning a lot more about turian anatomy in the next hour than her instructors at the Alliance could ever teach her.


End file.
